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Abstract

In the early days of the human genome project (HGP), during the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was skepticism that the genome project would produce biologically meaningful information. The reality is that bioinformatics has allowed us to extract far more biology from sequenced genomes than any published predictions in the early 1990s. Thanks to the efforts of many researchers in several subfields of bioinformatics, we can now process a sequenced genome through a series of computations to produce a quantitative metabolic flux model. Thus, surprisingly, bioinformatics has achieved what might have been held up as a holy grail of the field, before the goal was even articulated.

Author Comment

A Perspective Article we have submitted elsewhere without success, in finished form 2015/03/20. Precedes three somewhat related articles that have appeared recently:

Additional Information

Competing Interests

Author Contributions

Peter D Karp conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables.

Christos A Ouzounis conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Data Deposition

The following information was supplied regarding data availability:

The research in this article did not generate any raw data.

Funding

Parts of this work have been supported by the FP7 Collaborative Project MICROME (grant agreement #222886-2 to C.A.O.), funded by the European Commission. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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